


Inner Wiring

by Dragoneisha



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Crockertier, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 12:40:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12388266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragoneisha/pseuds/Dragoneisha
Summary: She looks inside herself, and all she sees is wires and code.





	Inner Wiring

When she blinks, wires scrape over her eyeballs. They constrict her fingers when she curls them into tight fists. They grind on the bones of her toes when she wiggles them.

She does all this every day, whether she wants to or not. A human can’t live without moving, after all. Neither can a troll, a cherub, a carapacian. Not even plants can be completely immobile, and Jane has to move. But it hurts. Every movement reminds her of their presence, the wires that used to pump red light and black ick over her body, turning her monochrome, her world black and white and red, all in service of the (her) Empress.

Jane can’t live without the presence of the wires.

She thinks it would be easier to handle if they were there in the first place. 

She remembered everything. The tiara jammed over her head, seeming tighter than it should be, tighter than it was ever supposed to be, than it ever had been before. She hadn’t liked it. Jane hadn’t liked any Crocker things since she learned of the nature of Betty herself, but this had been different, because of what it had done to her. Sometimes, Jane hated her own name, the thing that tied her to that monster, that beast, with a mouthful of fangs sparkling like a housewife’s smile. 

Sometimes Jane hated more than her name.

She knew in theory that she’d been checked over many times. Dirk swore that there was nothing of that horrid tech left in her, that he’d scanned her a hundred thousand times, and there was nothing left. He’d scrubbed from her every trace of the Condesce’s fuschia-clawed fingers. She was a clean slate. Jane was free.

But every time she blinked, she still felt the wires. They wrapped her bones like puppet’s strings, pulling on her with every move she made, so that Jane couldn’t even breathe without feeling the hands of the trollian Empress around her lungs, keeping her from breathing too deeply, and constricting every time she started to feel alright again. Jane wished the phantasmal hands would just close tight and keep her from ever breathing again. She wished she’d change targets to her heart, squeeze it like a stress ball and watch it pop, pour thick red over black and pink and stain it, stain it all. It would be fitting to have Jane’s blood on her hands. But she hadn’t ever hurt Jane at all. 

No, Jane had done that to herself. Supercomputer infesting her brain or not, every decision made in that time was hers. She knew because she remembered making them, with horrible, abject clarity. Jane without inhibition was not a Jane she wanted to know.

Jane had her autonomy again. She could walk and talk just like a real girl, and she did, but every smile pulled puppet’s wires between her teeth. 

She wished more than anything she could give it up. Subsume again, make decisions with the help of something so much smarter than she, a supercomputer processing the information taken in by mostly-organic eyes, plotting the right courses, moving her quicker than she ever could. Jane had made the decisions, but the supercomputer had made her… something else. It was something she didn’t understand, and Jane didn’t want to. Jane knew there was something so very wrong with her, and she didn’t think that was going to change.The damage had been done. And sometimes people don’t get better.

Sometimes they do. But sometimes they don’t, and several weeks after she’d been pulled from the (her) Empress’s clutches, Jane ached to return to the world that made sense, and she didn’t think that was what getting better felt like.

Maybe one day, when she picked out all the wires, she would be safe. She’d be free.

If only they were ever there in the first place.


End file.
